“Mrs. Strachey, you have again mistaken identity. I am a Jew, indeed, but not the Wandering Jew.”
“You’re not satisfied with the arrangements?” disappointed. She puckered her brows yet again over the fever-chart. “Would you mind sleeping in an attic?”
His imagination leapt. “I should like nothing better.”
They all four trooped upstairs to inspect. The Farme was a sprawling mansion of two storeys only. From the second, a narrow twisting staircase, not unlike a ladder, led to what were, once upon a time, granaries.
“This is the best of them,” Aureole threw open a door.
The attic revealed fully satisfied Sebastian’s “theatrical instinct,” as Stuart would have called it. Here his book could be written. Here, in shadowy company of Chatterton and Francis Thompson, he could be Starving-Genius-in-a-Garret; lord of his four walls.
“This will do splendidly, thanks,” he informed Aureole.
“I must get you up a bed from somewhere,” she remarked thoughtfully. “I wonder....”
She said no more. But Sebastian suspected that Mr. Mowbray was doomed.